Pen Pals Provide Linguistic Curios

After Robert Macfarlane published “Landmarks,” a book about the language of place, he received a deluge of mail from readers with “gift words.”

In 2015, the British writer Robert Macfarlane published “Landmarks,” a book about the language of place. In it, he catalogued regional words for things like fields and streams and icicles, which, he found out, were called “clinkerbells” and “dagglers” in Wessex, and “cancervells” in Exmoor; “ickles” in Yorkshire; “tankles” in Durham; “shuckles” in Cumbria; and “aquabob” in Kent. The book became a best-seller, an excerpt in the Guardian went viral—Britain!—and, since then, Macfarlane has found himself on the receiving end of a “speat” (sudden flood, Cumbria) or “cenllif” (torrent, Wales) of mail. He’s acquired so many “gift words,” as he calls them, that he appended to the paperback edition a list of five hundred entries culled from readers’ letters. He said the other day, “The one word that’s travelled the most widely from the whole project is ‘smeuse,’ ” which is Sussex dialect for a hole made in the bottom of a hedge by a small animal.

One morning recently, Macfarlane was standing before the Great Oriental Plane Tree, “an incredible lightning storm of spaghetti,” as he described it, that, for at least two centuries, has dominated the grounds of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he teaches.

“See here, two branches have grown into each other, this amazing sort of pythonish entwining?” he said. “That’s called ‘inosculation,’ which literally means ‘interkissing,’ or ‘in-kissing,’ as it were. It’s where the tree has kissed itself. It’s also called ‘pleaching.’ ”

Macfarlane got the word from a mycologist. He posted it on his Twitter account, which he set up a few weeks ago partly to reintroduce his crowdsourced lexicon into the wild. “Inosculation” got nine hundred and eighty likes, more than “sastrugi” (long, wavelike ridges of hardened snow) but not as many as “petrichor” (the smell in the air as or before rain falls on hot dry ground).

One commenter posted a picture of the conjoined trunks of two sycamores and wrote, “Now I’m ashamed to say I’ve always thought of these two as ‘the snoggers.’ ” Until September, a selection of the letters and “bits of yellowed prewar foolscap” that Macfarlane has received will be on display at the Wordsworth House and Garden, in Cumbria, alongside nature photographs by Macfarlane’s parents, John and Rosamund.

“I’ll call and say, ‘Mum, do you happen to have a sun dog?’ ” he explained.

“ ‘Oh, yes,’ ” she’ll reply. “ ‘Here’s one from Back o’ Skiddaw, in January.’ ” (Sun dogs, also called “parhelia,” are “glowing spots to either side of the sun, caused by light refracting in airborne ice crystals.”)

To the mailbag, then. Macfarlane led the way to his office. His bookshelves were filled with reference works: “The Water Glossary,” “Brickle, Nish and Knobbly: A Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow.” On the mantel were a tail feather from a black vulture, a bracket fungus, and an owl carved from jetsam whalebone that someone had sent to help him see in the dark. (His next book is about underworlds.) Although Macfarlane is an assiduous correspondent, papers stagnated on a blue carpet like “lodans” (little pools) or “blatters” (puddles).

“Do you know what?” Macfarlane said, picking up a paper towel that enfolded a pressed leaf. “This one’s about interarboration.”

Amid little watercolors and notes covered in gilded calligraphy sat a red-and-white candy-striped shoebox crammed with index cards, “the titles of which,” Macfarlane writes in his book, “formed a poem of their own: ‘Long-Range Forecasts,’ ‘Graces,’ ‘Clouds and Rainbows,’ ‘Winds.’ ” You could select one at random and a story would unfold. “To be away with the bees,” one said. “Meaning someone is slightly crazy.” Draw again. Four tantalizingly cryptic names for ladybugs: “doody-cow,” “gooly bug,” “king alison,” and “merrigo.”

“It’s not that I want people to speak this language—that’d be like dressing in ruffs—but I want it to live in the mind, if not the mouth,” Macfarlane said. His eye turned toward another “pudge” of papers, and he picked up an envelope.

“That’s from Margaret!” he said, withdrawing a photograph of what he described as a beechwood stream bank thronged with wild garlic.

Margaret Cockcroft, a ninety-six-year-old from Lancashire, was Macfarlane’s first pen pal. She wrote the week after “Landmarks” was published to tell him about “lighty-dark,” a word “invented by me (aged 11)” to denote the particular sort of dusk that follows a cold, clear day. This time, Cockcroft had written in appreciation of the series of blank pages that Macfarlane had left at the back of the book, in the hope that readers would record linguistic curios. “I intend to rally my memory and write in these pages you provide a small word-hoard of my own,” Cockcroft wrote. Her voice carried in it something both scientific and mysterious, like the weather. Like “yowetrummle,” maybe—a cold snap just after sheep have been sheared. ♦